Back in the old days (12-13 years ago) my first modem clocked in at a whopping 14.4K. Soon after I upgraded to a 56K modem and thought I was in heaven. That’s four times as fast!
Flash forward to today at work when out DSL line was down for a couple hours, thanks to some mistake at CenturyTel. Normally I would just work offline, but I had a few things I had to do online, so I plugged a long phone cord into the fax machine and used the modem built-in to my computer.
So. Painful.
I had to send a couple e-mails, which wasn’t so bad, but I also had to download a 5MB file. It took about 20 minutes. After the line came back up I downloaded a 50MB file in only a couple minutes.
It just goes to show how spoiled we’ve (I’ve) become. I’ve heard rumors that some people still use dialup. Those must be the same people that whip themselves with ropes laced with shards of glass and stuff.
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Dial Up users are limited to the very poor or very cheap. The very poor have little choice if they are correctly prioritizing their budget, but the very cheap get no sympathy from me.
They pay for cable TV, cell phones, and Netflix accts, but can’t “justify” the expense of broadband. It would only be nonsensical if it weren’t for the number of engineers and lawyers I personally know that fall into the same category.
And yes, I asked every single dial up user in the United States to formulate this entirely valid opinion.